High Heels and Homicide (18 page)

“The bat. Or bats,” Saint Just said, holding up the oil lantern and looking toward the many-eaved ceilings of the quite wide, yet more-than-twice-as-long attics. “None here. Shall we push on?”

Evan Pottinger stepped past Saint Just, wiping at a cobweb that had gotten caught in his hair. “This is where Sam thought we could do the bit where I kill the servant girl? The crew would have a hell of a time lighting the scene.” He turned to Maggie. “I used to work lights. Sound, too. Played stunt double a couple of times, did anything I could, until I got my first part. But I can tell you, there's no way we could film up here, not on our budget.”

“And Undercuffler would have known that almost immediately?” Saint Just asked. “He would have known that with only a cursory examination from, shall we say, right here?”

“He should have. One look's enough. So, where's the window someone hung him out of?”

Saint Just pointed away into the darkness. “According to my rude calculations, Maggie's bedchamber windows are some sixty of my usual walking paces that way.”

Evan shook his head. “Nope. No reason for Sam to go all that way. There's not even any lightbulbs up here. No electricity. So why would he stick around?”

“He heard something?” Maggie suggested, hanging onto Saint Just's sleeve. “He heard something, or saw something, and went to investigate? It's not a clear shot from here to the end of the wing. I mean, I can't see that far, but I think there are a couple of rooms up here.”

“That's a couple more than I want to see,” Evan said, heading for the stairs once more. “Have fun, don't take any wooden bats. Ha! Wooden bats—get it?”

“You don't have a lantern, Evan,” Maggie reminded him. “Besides, aren't you afraid of being alone, with a killer in the house?”

Saint Just watched the man's expression closely, then mentally scratched the fellow off his list of suspects as Evan's complexion paled slightly. Hardly the hero all of a sudden, and most definitely not the villain. “You'll be staying with us?”

“If you don't mind, yeah, I will. Not that I'm afraid. But I'm not stupid, either. Then again, I'm also not Lord Hervey. He'd be too bored to care, right? Believe me, I'm not bored. I'm just me right now, Evan Pottinger, a man intending to stay very much alive, thank you. Okay, what are we looking for, exactly?”

“Clues, dear man. Clues. Maggie, why don't you hand Evan your lantern while you stick close as mustard plaster to me as we initiate our search. Oh, and although I'm convinced you and I have come to the same conclusion, allow me to say that Evan here is of no worry to us.”

“I was wondering if you picked up on that,” Maggie said, handing over the lantern. “Here you go, Evan. Welcome to the wonderful world of amateur sleuthing. Look high, look low, don't touch anything, and give a yell if you see anything you shouldn't see.”

“Like what?” Evan asked, starting off toward the left side of the attics, while Saint Just and Maggie kept to the right side, under the eaves.

“If we knew that, my good man, our search would be infinitely easier,” Saint Just said, counting off steps as they passed by each low, dirty-paned dormer window.

The sound of the rain was much louder up here, and there were puddles here and there where the old roof had failed to hold back the water. A smell of damp was everywhere, the few bits and pieces of dust-sheeted furniture made more obvious, and more ominous, each time the lightning flashed.

“You notice something, Alex?” Maggie asked, speaking quietly as she pointed to the floor.

“Yes, I have. No footprints in the dust after those first few, which could have been from Sterling and Perry's aborted visit. None of the puddles disturbed. Don't mention either to Evan, if you please. I think the man is close to making a cake of himself as it is.”

“Yeah, if he was method acting now,” Maggie whispered, “he'd be dressed as the Cowardly Lion.”

“I beg your pardon?” There were times, too many times, when Saint Just became aware that his knowledge of the modern world, although growing each day, was at times still lamentably lacking in scope.

“Never mind. Are you still counting?”

At forty-two paces, the rooms began on either side of the attic. Each had its own door, and each door was closed, including that of the second room on the right.

“This is it?” Maggie asked, pointing to the door.

“I believe so. Evan? We could use an extra lantern over here. Ah, that's better. Shall we?”

Maggie motioned for Saint Just to go first, and he did so, holding the lantern high as he stepped into the room, then quickly ducked as several bats flew past him out into the main attic.

“Oh, cripes. Oh boy. Oh—
oh!
”

“It's all right, Evan,” Maggie said. Of course, she said that as she wrapped herself around Saint Just, all but cutting off his respirations.

“I'm so very fortunate to have two such stalwart assistants,” Saint Just said, peeling Maggie off him. “The chamber is larger than I'd supposed. What do you say we inspect the area outside this window, and then shut said window?”

“Good plan,” Maggie said, still holding onto him as, together, they sort of shuffled across the floor toward the window. “Really good plan. Except, how will the bats get back out again?”

“That, I believe, is a dilemma we'll leave for Sir Rudy,” Saint Just said, holding his lantern out over the scaffolding. “Ah.”

“Ah, what?” Maggie asked from behind him, her head pushed into his back. “Ah, I see? Ah, there's the scaffolding? Ah, the murderer left a clue? What
ah
?”

“Ah, it's still raining, actually,” Saint Just said, stepping back and winding the casement window shut, noting the squealing sound made by the old, unoiled hinges. Yes, Sterling and Perry may have had a lucky escape.

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his wet face. “Other than that, all I see is the remainder of the drapery cord blowing in the wind. We cut it from below, you understand, Arnaud and I. However, this does establish as fact that Undercuffler was hung from this room, and that he very possibly was killed here as well.”

“Right, Sherlock,” Maggie said quietly. “Now tell me how Sam and his killer
got
here.”

M
aggie figured she jumped, oh, a good three feet in the air when Sir Rudy said from the doorway to the attic room: “Hullo, everyone! Find anything interesting?”

“Nothing yet, Sir Rudy,” Alex said, squeezing his fingers lightly around Maggie's upper arm. Like she needed the warning?

“What brings you climbing up to the attics, Sir Rudy?” Maggie asked, before Alex could—because she was positive that would have been his next line.

“Me? Oh, nothing. I was just nosing about as head of the household, making sure everything was right and tight, and saw the door open to the stairway. Made me remember the leaks. I'd forgot them, you see. Mrs. Wimbles and the girls usually take charge. We've got the other wing all fixed—cost the earth, roofs—but I had my worries about this wing. So. Why are you all up here?”

“Good question, Sir Rudy. We're investigating,” Evan said, lifting one corner of a dust sheet off a large chest, then dropping it just as quickly. “The murderer hung Sam out that window over there. Did you know that?”

Sir Rudy went up on tiptoe, sort of leaned in the direction of the window. He did not, however, step farther into the room. “That so? Interesting bit of happenstance, wouldn't you say? You see, I've been hacking about in the history of the family, you know, since the last of the brood cocked up her toes a year ago—ninety, they say she was, but she was ninety-five if she was a day—leaving this entire pile open for my purchase. I'll bet she's spinning in her casket out back in the mausoleum, poor old biddy, to think someone in trade is walking these halls now, sleeping in her bed, eating fish and chips off her fancy china. Still, I used to help my Da with the landscaping around here as a boy. Makes me very sentimental about the place, so maybe that's all right with her.”

“I'm convinced the dear lady is resting comfortably knowing that you are restoring her family home to its former glory. Although,” Alex added, “the change of name may ameliorate some of that joy.”

“Yes, well, I'm Sir Rudy now, and it's no wonder I wanted to put my stamp on the place. Besides, Medwine Manor has a certain…ring to it, don't you think? At any rate, it would be a shame to just heartlessly evict them, all those hatchet-faced portraits and such. Thought I'd sort of adopt them, take them as my own, seeing as how all the family I've got is m'brother, Henry, who emigrated to Australia to marry a bassoonist with the Sydney Opera, if you can believe that. Oh, and there's Byrd, of course. He'd gone off with Henry for some months, but that didn't work out, so now I've got him again, right down to his quarterly allowance.”

“You don't sound all that choked up about that, do you, Sir Rudy?” Maggie asked, remembering the not-exactly-warm greeting Byrd had received from his uncle. “You two don't get along?”

“Occasionally we do. Runs hot and cold, my nephew does. Sort of jumped-up, thinking how he'll one day have all my money. Bigger than his britches, as you Americans say. Doesn't even seem to remember I threw him out last time he was here, my heir or no, telling him he'd not be welcome anymore. At least, not until he owned up to the missing silver candlesticks in the dining room.”

“He
stole
from you?” Maggie asked. “I wouldn't have let him back in, either. Not unless he crawled here from London on his hands and knees. Maybe over broken glass.”

“Yes, yes, thank you, Maggie,” Alex cut in. “We are all aware of your more bloodthirsty inclinations, along with your tendency to believe a punishment should outstrip the crime by at least double.”

“Only when I'm feeling magnanimous,” Maggie corrected. “My favorite is more a three-to-one retribution. I'm not proud of that, but I'm not giving it up, either.”

“As we also all well know. But, if we may be allowed to get back to the point? We seem to have been drifting, haven't we? Sir Rudy, you appeared to be slightly amused to hear that Mr. Undercuffler was hanged in this room. Is there a reason for that?”

Sir Rudy nodded furiously. “Oh, right. Lost my train of thought there for a moment, didn't I? Very well. I've been reading all those dry histories in the study, getting to know my new relatives, as it were. Anyway, I'm certain that this is the very same room where they found Uncle Willis. Our resident ghost, although I've yet to hear him scream or make anything go bump in the night. This was his bedchamber, you understand. Banished, he was, to the attics, for a nasty thing he'd done. At least, that's the story. Hanged himself, too. Odd that, don't you think? I wonder if I'll have two ghosts now? That could be confusing.”

Everyone looked up. “He hanged himself here? Where?” Maggie asked. “There aren't any open beams or anything.”

“Oh?” Sir Rudy rubbed at his chin. “Probably some chandelier that's long gone. Couldn't have been jolly, being stuck up here. Not even a fireplace. Just some holes somewhere in the floor, some pipes that lead off one of the main chimneys, or so I was told. Pretty modern for the seventeen hundreds. Some little trick conjured up by the fellow who added this wing. He's the one who did most of the prettying up around the place. But nothing I'd like, as the heat couldn't have been that strong, although I imagine the smoke made up for that. Well, I believe I'll push off to the kitchens and find some pots to catch that rainwater in, or it'll be down to the next floor, putting paid to the plaster.”

Maggie waved weakly as Sir Rudy left the room, followed by Evan Pottinger, who said he'd had enough of attics, then turned on Alex. “Sir Rudy sure does like the sound of his own voice, doesn't he? But did you hear that?
Two
hanged men in the same room, even centuries apart? Well, Alex, I'm waiting. Tell me that's a coincidence.”

“Coincidence? Possibly. Or inspiration,” Alex said, bending over to right an overturned chair. “Would you call this a sign of a struggle?”

“Maybe. Or a messy attic.” Maggie held her own lantern high and turned in a circle. “This is pretty big for an attic room, although this whole place is fairly immense. And cold. And damp. No central heat back in those days. No fireplace in here. Uncle Willis must have been a very bad boy. I wonder what he did. Oh, look, wallpaper. What there is left of it.” She touched the wall. “I think it might have been red, once upon a time.”

“And from that you conclude?” Alex asked, poking about in one of the corners of the room.

“Not a lot, sorry. Just that, maybe, once upon a time, this room wasn't all that bad. Wallpaper. Maybe a chandelier. But still the attic. And did you notice the size of the lock on that door? Maybe Uncle Willis was off his trolley, and they stashed him up here. People used to do that with mentally ill relatives because the madhouses were pretty awful. Then there's
Jane Eyre
, and Mr. Rochester's wife—that was later, and fiction, but still? Do you think we should go read up on Uncle Willis?”

Alex straightened, began looking around the entire room again. “Not unless you and the Troy Toy wish to join forces on the theory Uncle Willis murdered Undercuffler.”

Maggie stuck her tongue out at him. “Thanks, but no thanks. I guess I was just curious. Doesn't the whole coincidence thing make you curious?”

Alex paused in his inspection of the large chest Evan had looked at earlier and turned to her. “Yes, yes, I thought I'd noticed that when Pottinger moved the dust sheet. Hmmm.”

“Noticed what? And you didn't answer my question.”

“Oh, very well. Indeed, people are curious about ghosts, black-sheep relatives, all that sort of thing, aren't they? And with Sir Rudy so proud of and eager to share his knowledge about his newly acquired heritage. And all those histories he talks about. Maggie? How long has everyone else been here?”

“I don't know. A couple of days? Maybe five? And it's been raining for, like, three or four of them. Definitely long enough to get bored enough to maybe pick up one of those histories, read about Uncle Willis. Okay, I give up. Where is this going?”

“Nowhere that I can think of at the moment, I'm afraid. In fact, all it does is enlarge the number of suspects. If only Sir Rudy and, possibly, his nephew knew about Uncle Willis, this room, the method of the man's demise. But we've just proven that it's possible everyone knew.”

“Gee, thanks. That helped. What are you looking for? What did you see?”

Alex dropped the dust sheet back over the chest, and wiped his hands together. “Dusty, dusty. Of course, we've all been tramping about in here, so there's no helpful trail of footprints to follow.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What did you see?”

He lowered the lantern to the floor. “This.”

Maggie stepped closer, peered down at the floor. There were drag marks in front of the legs of the chest, for only an inch or two, in the dust. “Somebody tried to move this chest?”

“And gave it up as a bad job, yes. Lovely old piece, and quite heavy, I imagine. Would you care to give it a go?”

“Not in this lifetime. Besides, there's an easier way.” Maggie dropped to her knees, pushed her hair behind her ears, and leaned forward until her cheek touched the floor, then peered under the chest. “Move the lanterns a little closer…yeah, good. I can't see…wait a minute, I may see something.”

Still with her cheek against the floor—and convinced Saint Just was having himself a high old time watching as her backside stuck up in the air—she held out her arm, snapped her fingers. “Get me something I can slide under here. Where's your cane?”

“Interesting question. But we'll leave that for the moment, even as I tell you that the cane is downstairs, in the main saloon. How about this?”

Maggie felt something against her palm and closed her hand over it. “What's this? What did you give me?”

“I can't be sure, but it could be the handle of what was once a bedwarmer. Is that important to the exercise?”

“I'm cold, I'm getting filthy down here, and you're being sarcastic. Typical,” Maggie said as she maneuvered the handle under the chest. “I'm close to whatever it is now. I'm going to sweep it to the left, okay? Here goes!”

By the time she'd gotten to her feet, brushing herself down in case a pregnant spider had decided to nest in her hair, Alex was standing at his ease, Joanne Pertuccelli's stopwatch swinging from the thin, black lanyard he gingerly held between two fingers.

“Bingo! Our murder weapon,” Maggie said, grinning. “And shame on me for having so much fun, but—damn, we're good!”

“We are that, as far as this goes, yes,” Alex agreed. “Shall I recap? Undercuffler was murdered here, Joanne Pertuccelli's stopwatch the murder weapon, which was probably flung aside when the deed was done, only to be searched for, in vain, by our killer, and therefore left here for us to discover. Our murderer, perhaps thinking—correctly—that the now missing stopwatch would easily be seen as the murder weapon once Undercuffler's body was found, tippytoed back to the attics some hours later, searched once more for the stopwatch, once more fruitlessly, then—remembering the story of the late, unlamented, and possibly not-yet-gone-from-the-premises Uncle Willis—improvised by hanging Undercuffler outside from the scaffold, thus hopefully covering the tracks of the true mode and cause of death. How am I doing so far?”

“Well, the sentences were a little long—Bernie would have broken them up on line edit—but, basically, that's really good. Really, really good. Now tell me how Sam and the murderer got here, leaving no footprints in the dust from the steps all the way
to
here.”

Alex sighed as he tucked the stopwatch into his pocket. “Always the nitpicker. And no footprints in the dust
beyond
this room, in case you belatedly might have considered the possibility of yet another staircase closer to the center wing of the mansion. Shall we go join the others and think about that particular question in the warmth and light, preferably over a glass of wine?”

“That's got my vote,” Maggie said, heading for the door. “Oh,” she said, turning to face him for a moment, “a hidden passageway! Alex—there's a hidden passageway somewhere in this room. Why didn't you think of that one?”

“I did, my dear, but a cursory search showed nothing of interest. I'm also having trouble believing Undercuffler would have casually stumbled onto a secret passageway as he wandered about the manor, hunting up shooting locations, as I believe they're called. Sir Rudy certainly doesn't know about any secret passage. If he did, dear man, the whole world would know by now. He might have given tours. As I said, this will take more thought.”

He pulled his pocket watch free and held up the lantern. “Eight o'clock. My, how time keeps ticking away. What say we briefly adjourn downstairs to your bedchamber and I'll stand guard while you freshen up. I loathe saying it, but you do look rather as if you've been dragged through a hedge backwards.”

“Oh yeah, right. We're on the trail of a murderer, who probably knows by now that we are on his or her trail, by the way, but hey, let's keep up appearances.”

“Always, my dear,” Alex agreed, flicking a finger at her cheek, probably because she was all dusty and smudged. “Shall we go?”